new member presentation & ice workflow question

[nicole]

hi! an Administrator kindly suggested me to send this here
(it was sent yesterday night to the Softimage list.)
i am glad to share now this interface with you


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hello,

you understand, i am new here, i've been sent here from support (ending)

and no one to turn to there, to solve my little problems.

i will try to seize here the opportunity to meet new people and realities.




i will briefly present my relation to softimage.




i am probably far far less advanced than most of you.

i don't know any plug-ins in xsi, nor arnold etc

yet i have done a first fifteen minutes movie (in 2012) which will go along a book of

poetry and 2d and the whole shall be published early 2017




softimage is my only contact with 3d since 1997- i've studied and did

experimental animation in school, yet have done ink animation

since i was 17 after watching winsor macquay early movies.




why have i taken so long before producing a first 3d anim?

i think its mainly because of 1) interest in metaphysics and

writing. being autodidact. 2) i never had access to knowledge about

thinking the process as a whole, like a) you draw a mesh that will be deformed

b) you build a rig this or that way, etc until i got to see it in manny papamanos

with the larry dvd. until then my knowledge of the software was way too much scattered,

fragmented - and i wonder if its still not the case, (i follow some of courses online) but a bit late, yet now

i

have written a whole script (a philosophy with characters in English dialogues), now a storyboard of the first scene or

chapter of this. first scene that, again, i want to draw in 3d Softimage and 2d Painter

entirely by myself before finding any production.

by the time i complete first chapter (next two years) i hope there will still be people working

with softimage to go along with me with this "feature" movie.




now is the question:




i have a wish to have a rigged animated mesh (a character) to scatter, or fragment

(as in ice) and to have the fragments to become themselves rigged (tinier) animatable meshes.

i have the option of doing a cut insert at the editing (postproduction) table,

but i wanted to ask if you saw anyway to make the becoming of the character into fragments into characters in

a continuous fluid animation in 3d, as we would do rather easily enough in a drawn ink animation?




do you see a way to accomplish that effect in ice, or some other combinaison module in softimage?




i salute you,

thank you,

saitham

[nicole]

(some suggested i draw my problem to make it clearer, here it comes attached.)


it is really about

knowing if "it" (doing this 123becoming in one continuous shot)
is At Least Possible within SI?

if yes, how would you tackle the snag? ice? i do admit not mastering ice yet very much. (just have done a smallfluid animation in last movie)

but i have time and will to learn what i need to learn for my project.

so in order to see Clearer, what i need to know is what i need to study among all the ice possibilities , in order to accomplish the 123steps becoming i am talking here, about.




and also, a general workflow question aswell: how to quickly modify the geometry of the chunks into the geometry of the many "Characters", the new shapes taken by the chunks in step 3.

is there thus in SI something like a 3d "imprinting" or a way for an object to grab (with ease : i'd rather not re-model the Character out of each chunk ) or borrow the shape of an other object, and this grab, or capture, to be key animated? (again i want to transform the chunks into tiny Characters, copies of the one Big rigged Character of step 1) and on top of that
, if possible, them to become rigged in step 3?

(that is mostly what i need to be taught from you)


thanks,
saitham

[mc_axe]

Hey nicole

Im clueslees on ICE but i have seen lots videos with the particles of a main char flying off the skin . Or the main character disintegrated to small rigid bodies.

So probably you can get the positions.
But what is your plan right after, put small chars to walk?

Check lagoa, em flock,crowd fx
But rly you need someone that knows animation and ice to help you with that if you imagine houndreds or thousands of small chars it sounds like a rly complex scene alrdy

Maybe start with a super low polygon character, attach small chars on the vertices
And see where you get after that.
Maybe a Sea urchin with like 25 thorn vertices and 2 big eyes
And then convert all his thorns to jumping small chars that desert him

[nicole]

thanks mc_axe for your reply with your references ! -

i don't know if as soon as chrs are set as particles simulated,
i don't have anymore an access to their manual individual rig controls?
(i guess .. [but please do correct me if you think i am wrong in that idea]
i guess i don't have access to their manual controls because they would have to be seen by the system as instances, and that ice, or crowdfx, would only
understand their cycles and within the logic of the animation mixer -?)

i prefer to take time evaluate between the possibilities, before even trying with low polys.
(at the moment i am still building the character's shape)
ps. for manual freedom's sake, at the moment i am willing to learn ice , or ice plugins, but not yet the animation mixer !

[CYTE]

Hey Nicole,
as i see this task you have two options.
option one:
you model your big character. then you fragment it to pieces. then you create a blend shape for each piece to create a smaller character(by hand modelling).
after that i would rig the big character. i would rig the small characters. after that its a matter of blending between (a): the big character (b):a simulation that drives the
"explosion" of the big character into the smaller pieces and (c) the rigged smaller characters. you can all do this by using blendshapes.

option two:
you could build your big character made out of "atoms" like little spheres. you could then use ice to simulate this atoms to blend between a big character and smaller instances of the small character.

option one requires more hand work. option two requires more ice work.

cheers and have fun
softimage rocks!
CYTE